How to Read Your Dreams

Articles

In this, Part 2 of a three-part introduction to using dreams to solve problems, we explore how to learn the secret language in which our dreams talk to us.(See companion articles) Illustrations by Scott Byers

How to Read (Your Dreams)

By JAMES CORONATO
Aegis Press

The morning was overcast and wet as I drove down the long hill from my apartment. I was headed for the library, where I hoped to find a text that would help me through a challenging problem in my research.
While the Malibu rocketed down the hill, the rain slapping heavily against the windshield, I occupied myself with the radio, looking for music amidst the static. A commercial, murmuring in the background, caught my attention, and so I tuned it in. The offer was for a free waterbed, and the announcer’s manic voice was drilling home the bottom line: Free, free, no money, forget the dough, free waterbed. Still louder came the jingle: Dream, Dream waterbeds, D-R-E-A-M!

"Generally, it's not so bad having to wait until the rest of you is asleep before getting a little air time."

Suddenly, the car hit a puddle and hydroplaned, the rear end coming around wide. I overcorrected, we swung the other way, then twice more crossed the center line into the oncoming traffic before I regained control.
When my heart had stopped beating in my throat, I realized the commercial’s dream-like message had pointed to another possibility: Why not use dreams in my research? After all, I routinely used dreams to guide me through difficult situations in other areas of my life. Now, as a graduate engineering student, it seemed natural to try using them to solve technical problems, as well.
Life is survival, and survival is ongoing. Both are processes of creative discovery, where what we create are solutions--new viewpoints that enable us to see beyond obstacles that threaten to prevent us from accomplishing the things we wish to do. In a previous article, we showed how dreams can be used to discover these viewpoints, solving problems elegantly and quickly. Here, we take it a step further, and begin to examine how to understand the language in which our dreams speak to us.
A store of symbols
Often when we think of some thing--an occasion in the past, or a person, or location--we re-experience all the perceptions we originally had when we first were involved with that thing. Evidently, the complete group of sensations, thoughts, and feelings have been associated in our mind under a single aspect of the experience--the image of a person, say, or the name of a city. We have formed a symbol. We create symbols every day as a sort of cataloging system because it is easier for our minds to deal with a symbol than to sort out the myriad perceptions behind it.
The nature of our dreams discloses the nature of the survival concerns we face. If you ask children, “What is it that frightens you the most?” they are likely to describe dreams or fantasies in which they are being attacked, eaten, flayed, chased, gobbled, squashed, lost in a pit with vile snakes, or any of a like assortment of gruesome demises. They usually don’t say, “I’m in a meeting and I’m surprised by an opponent who has inside information I don’t have, which makes me look incompetent.” But although the levels of the two survival concerns appear radically different, their natures really are similar. A dream often will employ bizarre and exaggerated symbolism to represent ordinary business and social concerns. Everything in our lives--both inner and outer--is a symbol once it is represented in our imagination, and so is fair game as dream material. Poetic license is the norm, and we play it to the hilt.
Where do we get our symbols? We can appropriate them from others, but mostly we create them ourselves, usually unconsciously. If my first experience with a dog was as a young boy, when a puppy happily licked my face, my perception of “dogs” would be (and is) vastly different from that of someone whose initial encounter involved a frightening attack from a pit bull terrier. We all know someone with an “irrational” fear of something.
In either case, even when the experience which spawned the image eludes conscious memory, the subconscious, magnificent learner that it is, rarely forgets it. When triggered by the right stimulus, the subconscious mind instantly accesses a stored memory and reacts, rarely notifying us beforehand. Furthermore, reactions usually take place behind closed doors, with only the boos or applause registering in our conscious brain and in our nervous system. In fact, of the thousands of symbols in our lives, we are consciously aware only of a small minority of them. All are important, however, because our dreams speak in a language whose vocabulary consists of those symbols.
Survival skill
Why do we dream? Survival is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment occupation, and the lessons one learns today prepare him for surviving tomorrow. Our highest viewpoint navigates us through life as best as it is able, but we operate at a number of levels, and our subconscious desires have their roots in several, possibly conflicting, objectives. At the instinctual level we seek gratification with impulses unfettered by social norm or constraint, but in the same realm lie buried the roots of a drive that carries us forward in our growth, a drive which makes us greater, more successful human beings. Though this drive never stops, our waking awareness is sometimes at a loss as to what to make of the circumstances in which it finds itself. Our job as navigator is to communicate what the next step is, to that part of us in charge of actually taking it. Much of the time, however, our attention is distracted by the more demanding concerns of modern life, and intuitive guidance takes a back seat to radio, television, office, noise, our love life, whatever. Since the only time we are without these distractions is at night--we dream.
Generally, it’s not so bad having to wait until the rest of you is asleep before getting a little air time. It’s kind of nice working at that hour. No interruptions, a captive audience, what could be easier? The fact is, even when we are springing some fascinating new advice on ourselves, it’s not often we take seriously what our dreams have to say, and when we do, we rarely take the time to figure out what it is they’re telling us.
Remembering our dreams is the most important step in understanding them, since nothing can be taught very effectively when the student isn’t taking the instructor seriously. Recall that one way to remember dreams is to write a series of commands each night before bed clearly defining what we expect to happen in the course of our dreaming.
Use the following simple outline as a guide (from Part 1):
1. When my physical body falls asleep, I remain awake in my dreaming self and slip easily into a conscious awareness of my dreams.
2. I then have dreams that show me the solution to the problems on which I am working.
3. After each experience I awaken physically with the answer to my question, and I record all the important details of the dream.
4. By the morning, I will have found the solution to: (state the problem explicitly).
Practice these steps in your mind a few times as you drift off to sleep with a pleasant feeling of happiness and satisfaction that you have been successful. Your dream recall will soon begin to improve.
Your personal dictionary
Once we’ve captured them, how do we figure out what our dreams are saying? In dreams we describe things to ourself in ways we’ll understand them. I remember one dream I had when I was in the midst of solving an engineering problem with a number of variables. I had begun inadvertently to think of the thing as a veritable “zoo” of conflicting factors. They were confusing to sort out because what my intuition was telling me conflicted with what “logic” dictated should be the case.
In the dream I found myself standing before a telephone booth. I wanted to make a phone call, but the booth was bulging in typical cartoon fashion with an impossible assortment of animals who were stuffed into it. An elephant and rhinoceros were on top, and a monkey, two birds, and a mouse were crammed into the bottom. They were uncomfortable, and I wanted to use the phone, so I asked them, What should we do? In response, the elephant and rhinoceros dropped out and walked off, while the rest of the menagerie remained.
Thus, the larger factors (animals) in the problem‘s equation (phone booth) could be ignored, the smaller ones eventually becoming most important. This analysis proved to be correct, which meant my intuition had been right all along.
Another dream sequence saw me accidentally kicking my eyeglasses

"The dream state can be used for more than simply gathering information."

underfoot and stepping on them. I had become accustomed to thinking of my glasses as “aids to seeing objectively,” and my shoes as representing my personality. The dream made me realize that a problem I had been having with my spouse really was just a personality trait getting in the way of my objectivity.
Because our experience typically involves relationships between objects (people and things), humans invented a system called language wherein standardized symbols (words) are chosen to represent different objects and relationships. We combine the symbols into sentences in various ways in order to communicate our experience to one another. If I want to convey a certain concept to you, I look up the appropriate word in my dictionary and say it. You hear the word, look it up in your dictionary, and read its definition. What makes the system work is the standardization. If we are both using the same dictionary, then we both now have the same definition in mind, and my meaning has been conveyed intact. The same concept explains why we are most qualified to interpret our own dreams. Our personal dictionaries consist of a bank of images created from past experiences, each of which may have some dominant perception associated with it, a “tag” that allows us to index it easily. Think about how different perceptions of the same event can be, even between two people who are close to each other. That should give you an idea of why each individual’s dictionary of dream symbols is unique, and why the same image may mean something entirely different to you than it does to me. My symbols have included: being pulled over by a traffic cop (going too fast), a train (I’m on track), power lines (power trip or power play), and escape from prison (freedom).
Learning our own dream language can be a fascinating education. Start like this. (For an example, see article: "How to Interpret a Dream")
1. Take a dream experience and write it out in full, including every significant detail you notice in your mind’s eye. Remember that there is no wasted detail in your dream message.
2. Highlight the significant words, actions, phrases, and locations in the dream. Include anything that stands out as a reference or that provides context, information, or orientation: these are the key phrases.
3. Recopy the key phrases on the paper below where you’ve written the dream.
4. Next to each one, write whatever comes to mind when you think of that word or phrase, including colors, attitudes, feelings, memories that contain an object like it, etc. In this way, collect a group of subconscious synonyms for each key phrase.
5. Circle the one synonym for each key phrase that stands out as the strongest association or the most relevant interpretation of that item for you.
6. In the dream paragraph where a particular term has been highlighted, replace it with the circled synonym you have found for that term every place it occurs in the paragraph. Rewrite the paragraph with all the new substitutions, and it will read like a normal event. The meaning will pop out at you.
Sometimes symbols need no interpretation. Two months after the incident in the opening paragraph, I had begun to investigate alternative ways to solve a complex engineering problem I was working on at the time. In a dream, several three-dimensional animations depicted graphically how variables in the problem would behave if they were evaluated with a different branch of mathematics than I had been using. Several days later, while leafing through a library book, I came across diagrams identical to the dream figures, but in two-dimensional form. The formulation in the chapter provided critical information I needed to begin an analysis using the new approach.
Life is creative, regardless of whether we are inventing something, making decisions, solving problems, or expressing ourselves artistically. So, the dream state can be used for more than simply gathering information.

Illuminating a turning point
One way dreams can be useful is in making decisions. A test of my decision-making ability occurred as I struggled to complete a certain research project. Progress had stopped, the computers I was using were broken, and there seemed no solution to the problem. Weeks of frustration at my inability to complete the work culminated in a dream which indicated that I should simply leave town. Out of options and facing apparently insurmountable odds there, I took the advice and left! In an odd turn of events, my vacation forced me to re-examine the data I already possessed, and to realize that I actually had what I needed already. After such a long delay, the dream had given me the key to complete the project almost immediately.
In short, dreams can provide us overviews of our life. Whether our concerns be technical, social, spiritual, emotional, or physical, it’s all the same to our dreaming self. Survival is the process of growth, and there is no problem in life, met as a challenge, that does not force us to grow in getting beyond it.
It is indeed fortunate, therefore, that the symbols we arrange around us provide such an intimate link to our inner composition. For they are ours to do with as we please, to change them at will, to eliminate what is not needed, and to introduce ones more suited to the life we would live. As exact as mathematics, our universe of symbols is one of chalk on a blackboard, not granite on a tombstone. Learn to interpret your dreams, and your life becomes transparent. Learn to see through life, and your dreams become real.

Comments?

...commercial's dream-like message: To me, the elements of this experience (library trip, swerve, bed) signalled a waking dream. Waking dreams may be thought of as living pictures of our own state of consciousness that form on the outer screen of our life. They can be understood the same way sleeping dreams can. More on this later.

© Copyright 1989-2006 James Coronato. All rights reserved.